
A Volo d’Uccello (A Bird’s-Eye View), 2010 - Marinus Boezem
about this work
This edition by Marinus Boezem, A Volo d’Uccello (A Bird’s-Eye View), is part of a threefold project of the same name that took place in De Vleeshal in 2010. For this project, Marinus Boezem recreated the map of the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in birdseed on the roof of his studio. Via a webcam connection, the various stages of the process were broadcasted onto video screens in the exhibition space of De Vleeshal, where a second (indoor) map in birdseed was installed on its black-and white tiles. Both maps eventually disappeared as hungry pigeons fed themselves with the meticulously installed map of seeds, only to evolve into a moss leftover on the artist’s roof, as a reminder of the project.
The edition is a ‘mental sketch’; an assembly of the different elements Marinus Boezem was inspired by when he created A Volo d’Uccello (A Bird’s-Eye View). In the edition, the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi is again laid out in birdseed, accompanied by images of several birds. The bird images originate from of a card game the artist bought in the 70s, during his visit to the coastal area Het Zwin in Belgium. Marinus Boezem’s fascination for St. Francis of Assisi - often depicted surrounded by birds - stems from attending a catholic school in the 1930s, where he used to read small books about the saint.
An accompanying publication also titled A Volo d’Uccello was published in 2015.